The two works of Rodulfus Glaber, the Histories and the Life of St William, have always been held to be of special importance because of the supposed Cluniac origins of this writer. Glaber is commonly referred to as a Cluniac monk, as can be seen from the title of an important modern series of articles about him, while Delaruelle's famous essay about Cluny and Holy War leans heavily upon his ‘Cluniac connections’. The lack of literary sources about the history of Cluny in the reign of Odilo accounts in part for the extensive use of his Histories by the numerous corps of historians of Cluny. By contrast the Life has been somewhat neglected, and indeed the literature on St William of Dijon in English is very limited. It is important, therefore, to discover in what sense, if any, Glaber can be called a Cluniac.

The concile national of 1811 was one of the greatest flashpoints in the struggle that pitted the Napoleonic Empire against the papacy. This episode, which deserves to be situated within more recent historiographical trends, reveals much about the nature of Napoleonic imperialism and the Church's distrust for the power of the state. This article puts forward the view that the failure of the concile national was not strategic but tactical. Several bishops were frustrated with the pope's recalcitrance over episcopal investiture and fearful of schism. But their initial openness to neo-conciliarism turned to hostility when confronted with the state's intolerance.

This article demonstrates that from the mid- to late fourteenth century the English clergy pursued a sustained campaign to protect episcopal temporalities from royal seizure by asserting the right of bishops to be judged by their peers in parliament. The most important stage of this movement came in the parliament of January 1352 when the clergy made a case for episcopal exceptionalism in English law. The legal identity of bishops in England underwent a seismic shift and it was conceded that in certain cases a bishop should be judged in accordance with his temporalities rather than his spiritual office.

This article examines the role, in patristic and medieval commentaries on Isaiah in the west up until 1150, of the theme of the ‘remnant’ (Isaiah i.9; x.22), which is related to Jewish Christians by St Paul. Assumed to signify the small number of Jewish converts in Apostolic times, it could also be used on the one hand to minimise the Jewish contribution to the early Church (St Jerome and Rupert of Deutz) and on the other hand to emphasise it (Haimo of Auxerre, Bruno of Segni and Herveus of Bourg-Dieu). Some authors, however, simply ignore the question (Arnold of Bonneval and Rainald of St Eloi).

It is clear from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica that England then enjoyed close relations with the Roman Church. Some passages in the work have been seen as reflecting a high doctrine of the papacy, but when carefully read they turn out to be devoid of any understanding of the papacy. The same is true of Bede's discussions of Christ's words to Peter (Matthew xvi.18a, 19) in his writing on the Bible. Yet other English authors of the period had attitudes very different to those of Bede; suggestions are offered as to why Bede took the line he did.

Gender ideologies have been shown to be an important element in creating national identity. The settler population of early colonial Queensland was largely drawn from Protestant England and Scotland, and Catholic Ireland. In the process of social formation, Anglican men contributed to building a Protestant hegemony that strove to marginalise the Irish Catholic part of the population. In doing so they bracketed Tractarianism with Catholicism in an attempt to assert the essentially Protestant nature of Anglicanism. This paper explores three debates that took place in the public domain in the period 1855–65, and their impact on the local Anglican community and on social formation in the fledgling colonial society.

This examination of John Wesley's emendation and elaboration of John Foxe's Acts and monuments, shows how Wesley constructed Foxe's text and himself within a tradition of learned English ministry. Offering an expanded vision of the role and function of the popularly styled Book of Martyrs, this article combines readings of Wesley's journals and secondary analyses to permit insights into Wesley's relationship with the established Church of England, his intentions in taking up Foxe's text and his conceptions of hierarchy, pastoral duty and ministry. It contradicts scholarly expectation of anti-Catholic impulses behind Foxeian publications and their effects, and encourages a more nuanced appreciation of the contemporary application of the terms ‘Catholic’ and ‘papist’.

In the late twelfth century, Bartholomew, bishop of Exeter (1161–84), identified astrology as the most serious heresy facing the English Church. The evidence of Bartholomew's writing suggests that astrology became more widely accepted among the English clergy during his episcopal tenure. It also supports the view that popular heretical movements enjoyed little success in England during this period, in contrast to some regions in mainland Europe. Instead, it was scholars deemed guilty of intellectual error, and above all the astrologers, who became the focus of Bartholomew's anxieties about heresy and the intellectual culture of his day.

One of the weaknesses of post-colonial theory has been a tendency to view colonialism in unitary and essentialist terms. This weakness is particularly evident in post-colonialism's treatment of missionary endeavour. This is the result of insufficient engagements with missionary texts. This article engages with one of the most remarkable missionary texts. Dan Crawford's Thinking black reveals an openness to Africa far in advance of prevailing ideas. While this enlightened attitude had its roots partially in the author's character, it was also an expression of the primitivism typical of the Brethren movement. We may therefore see Crawford as a paradigm of Brethren missions.

Ambrose's funeral sermons on the emperors Valentinian and Theodosius have been analysed as texts borrowing from classical rhetorical traditions, and as repositories of detail about contemporary politics. However, the crucial context for these texts was ecclesiastical; they were sermons, preached in church in services during which lessons were read from the Bible. This article shows that a consideration of this particular historical and liturgical context helps to elucidate Ambrose's ‘levelling’ political thought, and that identifying the biblical cadences of the sermons, far from being obfuscatory, is the key to understanding them.

This article examines the development of Protestant thought in early Elizabethan England by analysing James Pilkington's 1560 commentary on the Old Testament book of Aggeus (Haggai). Pilkington's commentary contained ideas about the Church and its reform that had deep affinities with radical Marian Protestant thought about purity, separation and resistance to ungodly monarchs. The way in which Pilkington transformed these ideas in a time of Protestant political ascendancy provides valuable insights into the nature and development of English Puritanism.